Heat of vaporization

[Master Miner]

Is heat of vaporization / heat of condensation modeled in the game?

I've just discovered that the specific heat of steam is wrong in the game - it is same as water instead of some 2.08 J/(g·K)
That made me feel uneasy and wonder...

Heat of vaporization is very easy to model:
- vaporize only a part of the liquid, subtract vaporization heat from the remaining liquid
- condense only a part of the steam, add heat to the remaining steam
until there is only small amount of liquid or steam there.
For the last "grain" - consume / release total heat.

IMO the game needs a good in-game physics. If the physics aspect is a chosen game aspect that should approximate the RL physics, if playing with the physics is an important aspect of the game, then it shouldn't be lousy. It should receive much more love.

[Zarquan]

I think the idea is in the game, though I can't speak to its accuracy.  I painted in 600C petroleum and it boiled and ended up as ~594 C natural gas.

[Kasuha]

Some time ago, state changes happened exactly 5 C beyond the declared state change temperature. That means, water would convert to steam at 105 C, steam would convert to water at 95 C. It can be interpreted as a kind of state change heat but without actual heat difference involved.

It can be considered a kind of state change heat implementation, as you need to pump more heat into water for it to change, and then pull more heat from steam to condense it, except there's no heat hidden in the actual state change.

Realistic state change heat would be complicated. E.g. a block of ice would need to periodically release small amounts of water proportional to amount of heat it absorbed. Some things would be made better with it, for instance a heap of 20 tons of ice dumped into the pool would not release all the water at once. But the physics engine would need to make lots of small periodic insertions of elements into the environment and that could have serious impact on the game's performance.

[Master Miner]

1 hour ago, Kasuha said:

the physics engine would need to make lots of small periodic insertions of elements

Yes, that's how it should be implemented IMO.
I don't think that it should have any significant impact on performance because the calculations need to be periodically made anyway and phase changes usually happen in only few cells simultaneously.
(It seems that there is a huge optimization potential anyway, just to mention already discussed multi-threading.)